Application

One page essay required, describing your career goals, research interests/experience, the type of neuroscience doctoral program to which you would like to apply, and any other helpful information for the admissions committee.

Transcripts (Unofficial from home school & Official from transfer school)

2 letters of recommendation (sent by recommenders directly to program administrator)

Participating Universities

Laura Craciun

School:

New York University

Graduation Status:

Graduated

Description:

I am a senior at NYU majoring in neural science with a minor in art history. Since the summer of 2012, I have been working in Dr. Adam Carter’s lab at NYU’s Center of Neural Science. My main interests lie in exploring the functional properties of neurons and their circuitry in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in high-level processing and behaviors. In 2013, I spent my summer at Brown University’s Department of Neural Science doing research in Dr. Barry Connors’s lab and collaborating with Dr. Mark Zervas’s lab at Brown’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. My project focused on a part of the thalamus called the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) that plays an important role in the regulation of the thalamocortical circuit. I labeled the different interneurons in the TRN to get a better understanding of how this structure functions. I spent the summer of 2014 at the University of Michigan working in Dr. Ronald Holz’s lab. There, I studied the role of alpha-synuclein in secretion by examining how variations in its expression can alter the secretion of tissue plasminogen activator (tPA). I am now in the process of applying to graduate programs in neuroscience, interested in labs that are studying the cellular mechanisms of vesicular trafficking and secretion.